Can U.S. consumers thrive if corporations don't?

Overall, corporate earnings have become less dependent on the health of the U.S. economy. The big question is whether this also means that the U.S. economy has become less dependent on them.

Media: TheStreet

U.S. workers and consumers (who are for the most part the same people) seem to be doing pretty well at the moment. Businesses, not so much. As Bloomberg reported last week:

"Consumer spending grew last year by the most since 2005, in spite of a slight slackening in the fourth quarter. Nonresidential business investment, meanwhile, rose at its slowest pace since 2010 as oil and gas companies sharply curtailed spending."

The story suggested this was a temporary juxtaposition; eventually consumers would pull businesses up, or businesses would drag consumers down. Most economists predict it will be the former and the U.S. economy won't fall into a recession, the story said. Either way, the assumption is that businesses and consumers will eventually get back in sync. That's how things have worked in the past.

We've been hearing a lot over the past decade-plus, though, about the diverging fortunes of U.S.-based corporations and U.S.-based people. The corporations have for the most part been thriving in an age of globalization. The people, not so much. Corporate profits in the U.S. have almost tripled since 2000, adjusted for inflation; real median household income is down 7 percent since then.

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Could it be, then, that the fortunes of corporations and average Americans have become so disconnected that things could now go in the other direction, with corporations struggling in the face of a global slump and consumers laughing all the way to the store for years to come?

Short answer: I don't think so, at least not for that long. This will be interesting to watch, though.

One major reason why corporations have thrived while people haven't is that big corporations in particular were able to take advantage of growth overseas even as the U.S. economy stagnated. Estimates of the share of revenue that the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index get from abroad range from 33 percent to 48 percent. That share has been pretty flat since the recession, but is upfrom a decade ago. The Bureau of Economic Analysis's much broader measure of foreign earnings, meanwhile, shows a huge rise since the mid-twentieth century.

Some of the biggest names in U.S. business are particularly dependent on overseas markets. Apple, for example, got 59.8 percent of its revenue and 62.8 percent of its operating income from outside the Americas in its 2015 fiscal year. In the most recent fiscal year for which numbers are available, Exxon Mobil got 67.3 percent of revenue from outside the U.S., Alphabet 57.3 percent, Microsoft 54.1 percent, Facebook and General Electric 52.5 percent.

Overall, corporate earnings have become less dependent on the health of the U.S. economy. The big question is whether this also means that the U.S. economy has become less dependent on them.

In the past, a decline in corporate profits has usually been bad news for the U.S. economy. What usually happens is that, with profits under pressure, corporations start slashing jobs and cutting back on investment. Consumers eventually respond by cutting back spending as well, and the economy falls into recession. Since 2011, corporate profits' share of national income has been declining. But with so much of that profit now coming from outside the U.S., it's at least possible that corporations will slash jobs and cut back on investment somewhere else.